In February 2024 Auckland Council rolled out a new set of recycling guidelines. This sees Auckland move to match the rest of the country. Makes some sense, having one set of ‘how to for recycling’ across Aotearoa.

While we're keen to ensure that everything is in the right place, we are particularly interested in where the bottles and cans we sell to you go.

From February 2024, these things go in your recycling bin: glass bottles and jars; paper and cardboard; plastic bottles, trays, and containers (grades 1, 2 and 5 only); tin, steel and aluminium cans.

What’s excluded? Items less than 50mm

(caps, small cosmetic and spice containers); aerosol cans (steel and aluminium); liquid paperboard (juice boxes and beverage cartons); plastics 3, 4, 6 and 7; aluminium foil and trays, all lids; items over 4 litres.

So that’s glass wine bottles in the recycling bin, lids off, corks out and in the waste, with the bottles empty and rinsed. Beer cans into recycling; the paper packaging around your beer also into recycling. Spirit bottles into recycling with the lids in the waste.

Anything in a Tetra pack can’t be recycled and goes in the waste. It’s important to remember to put everything into recycling bins empty and washed, as Auckland has

a significant issue with contamination of its waste, which then increases the cost of sorting and processing.

While glass bottles do go in your recycling bin, your broken wine glass does not. That’s into the trash bin.

Available at our Glengarry Kingsland, Grey Lynn, Khyber Pass & Kelburn stores.

Again Again is an online platform built around the values of kaitiakitanga, whanaungatanga and accountability.

Again Again enables Glengarry to loan and track returnable packaging. Download the Again Again app, scan the app instore to borrow a Grower bottle from us. Purchase the beer to go in it and away you go.

When you return your bottle, your app is credited for the bottle you return, either at Glengarry or somewhere else using Again Again. It’s all about a circular economy without waste.

Yep. Just the one planet. And gosh, don’t we wish we’d taken a bit more care of it. As the world collectively struggles with the challenges we are all now facing, we know without reservation just how critical it is that every one of us plays a part in diverting the looming disaster that as a species we’ve heedlessly heaped upon our children’s futures.

For us as retailers, one doesn’t have to look any further than the degree of disruption and upheaval being experienced by our grape, hop and grain growers to appreciate the scale of the problem that now engulfs us.

If there was a singular answer to this, we’d all be doing it; quite simply, there’s not. Obviously, neither is waiting it out an option. The right thing for us to do as a company was to start to make change. to strive to be a more sustainable and environmentally friendly business in the way we do things.

It is, of course, a journey, and we are on our way. We wanted to share some of projects we’ve embarked on. They are not yet all in place, but we have the plans and strategies to get them there.

We continue developing our programme to be sustainable in our packaging. We’ve started working with recycled paper wrap and replacing plastic stickers with paper ones. Plastic - so useful, and yet so lethal. Of course there are issues to overcome: Sustainably wrapped broken bottles that incur work and energy to replace are not, strictly speaking, that sustainable. We are working to overcome these problems and continuously look for new solutions.

We also reuse packaging that is sent to us. So while we work with our suppliers to remove unsustainable packaging from their supply chains, reusing materials that do arrive to us is more useful than simply discarding them.

Over the previous year we have worked through identifying all the waste generated in the business. From that we’ve initiated a project to divide up our cardboard, our plastic wrap off pallets and our general waste. We are now collected the plastic wrap that comes from pallets of wine that are sent to us and rerouting it to be made into fence posts.

We are reusing as much cardboard as possible; you’ll find It packed around the goods we send out. And at our Khyber Pass store we are making our cardboard into paper wrap to be used for packaging. What we can’t reuse is being collated, collected and recycled.

‘Are we there yet?’ we hear you say. No, we are not. Are we on a dedicated path to get there? Yes, we are.